I Would Like to Be a Mom One Day, and This Terrifies Me
Back in the spring of 2019, I sat as the only Black woman on a panel called “Navigating the Intersection of Feminism and Finance” in a spacious loft in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. The conversation was going as you might expect. We’d covered asking for more money, knowing our worth, the value of discussing our salary with other women, and so on, until one panelist, an entrepreneur in the motherhood space, shared with the group that her customer base consisted mostly of upper-class white moms. She wanted to know how to expand her reach, or at least how to encourage these women to do more outside their own communities. I’m not sure if she was posing the question to the other panelists, the audience, or both, but I decided to step in. Time was of the essence, so I said, simply, “They’re dying. Black mothers are dying. If you want to know whom to help, there is your answer.”
Unbeknownst to everyone else in the room, I had been nursing a pain in the pit of my stomach for quite some time, having absorbed story after story on the Black maternal mortality rate. A year earlier, I’d read the New York Times Magazine’s reporting on the disparity between Black infant deaths and white infant deaths, how it was wider then than it was in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery. Not only that, but a Black woman with an advanced degree was more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education. I haven’t been the same since reading this. After all, I am a 28-year-old Black woman with an advanced degree, and I would like to be a mother one day.
While I take my birth control pills religiously, my favorite leisure activities include scrolling through Instagram for images of adorable Black babies, and searching YouTube for videos of Black mothers showing their newborn-care routines. When I bashfully opened up to a friend about this and asked her, “Why do I do these things?” she told me, “I guess it’s the satisfaction of seeing them alive.”
A few months after that shocking report came out, I graduated from my MFA program with a 100-page thesis about a teen mother who gives birth to a child still inside its amniotic sac, or what doctors call an “en caul” birth. The occurrence is quite rare, and it’s considered a great gift in African American folklore. In my family, we say the child is “born with a veil.” Many believe the caul, or veil, contains spiritual powers, including the ability to heal. On the advice of one of my mentors, I turned the story into a novel, and chose to set it in Harlem—my home since 2015, and a nexus of gentrification, urban sprawl, magic, and familial duty. I thought about the vulnerability of my own Black female body in the midst of a metropolis, and how I might move differently if I were impervious to any kind of physical ailment.
I immersed myself in the works of my literary ancestors: authors like Toni Morrison, who explores the depths of a mother’s love, and the lengths she’ll go to spare her child the horrors of slavery, in her novel Beloved; and Edward P. Jones, whose wondrous sensibility toward Black mothers is apparent in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. I looked at my own mother, who carried me to term despite being violently ill with hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare condition causing extreme, persistent nausea during pregnancy. I recalled the experience of Tressie McMillan Cottom, PhD, a Black scholar who wrote in 2019 of losing a baby after complaining of pain for days. I thought of Serena Williams, who, even with all her money and erudition, was still left careening toward death’s door 24 hours after her own childbirth experience. Only after she relentlessly insisted that her medical team give her a CT scan did they realize what she already knew, as someone with a history of blood clots: She was having a pulmonary embolism. We’ve read all the stories, and seen all the studies—including those now finding that Black Americans are more likely to die of COVID-19 than white Americans. The common thread is that doctors are downplaying Black patients’ complaints of pain and withholding necessary treatments. No one knows how to properly care for us.
So what does it mean to be a Black mother in a time when Black women’s bodies are not exclusively used for exploitative labor practices? What does it mean to be a Black woman who can choose how, where, and with whom she wants to start a family? What does it mean to be a Black mother who not only survives but remains alive long enough to pass on stories, customs, traditions, and most of all, love?
I’ve racked my brain over these questions since turning that 100-page story into Caul Baby, my first novel, but I do not write to answer. I write to investigate. I wanted to create imperfect characters—Black mothers who make different choices and take different paths, yet still realize, even within this world of magical realism, that they have to fend for themselves, because no one else is looking out for them.
I had to work on the final edits during the height of the George Floyd protests. Prior to this, in a time of social isolation, Harlem was abnormally quiet. I couldn’t even hear the Black mothers through the walls on either side of my apartment, only the near-constant whir of ambulance sirens. But with the loss of another Black man, somebody’s own child, who used one of his final breaths to call out “Mama,” I heard an explosion of sound that propelled me back to my writing desk.
I was reminded of all the life I’d created on the page, and all the life that I had left to give—for myself and, hopefully, someday, to another. I was inspired to keep moving forward, and to keep speaking out, because in spite of all the statistics, Black mothers are still here. Even if they can only rely on one another for support, their beauty is not only in their ability to create life, but in their undying efforts to see it flourish and progress toward a natural end. In their striving, I find hope—a hope that has stretched to bring me and many of my loved ones to this current and urgent moment. I venerate those who came before me with an offering. While others of the diaspora may choose alcohol, food, or a sacred text, my words are my offering, and I lay them at the altar of my ancestors’ prodigious faith.
This article appears in the April 2021 issue.
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